According to researches at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh, Inserting tubes in the eardrums of children under the age of 3 has no measurable effect on improving speech, language, cognitive or psychosocial development.

The researches studied 588 3 year olds from infancy and concluded that their findings provided no evidence that the insertion of ear tubes improves a child's developmental progress. Approximately 280,000 children under the age of 3 have tubes inserted annually.

Whether or not to give a child tympanostomy tubes.... tubes in the ears... is a debate that has raged in medicine for two decades. One of the major arguments in favor of tubes is that if children have fluid behind the middle ear it can cut down on their ability to hear and potentially lead to learning problems. But a report in the New England Journal of Medicine says this is not the case. According to the report, in children younger than 3 years of age who have persistent otitis media, prompt insertion of tympanostomy tubes does not measurably improve developmental outcomes. The procedure has little long-term benefit with respect to hearing behavior or learning and development.

Implanting ear tubes, an operation done on hundreds of thousands of toddlers each year, does not appear to improve their speech and learning development and may not be worth the risks and the cost, a study suggests. Researchers in Pittsburgh looked at two groups of toddlers: those who got ear tubes after three months of fluid in their ears (the standard guideline) and those who waited up to nine months before tubes were inserted. The children were tested for speech, language, learning and behavior when they turned 3. "The bottom line was there wasn't any difference in the developmental outcomes as best we could measure them at age 3," said Dr. Jack L. Paradise of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh.

Spontaneous recovery from recurrent acute otitis media is common with increasing age. Thus, until reliable causal evidence between recurrent otitis media and developmental disability is presented, chemoprophylaxis or tympanostomy tubes seem superfluous for most infants after the age of 16 months.

Parental expectations to antimicrobial treatment and awareness about resistance development appear to influence treatment strategies for AOM. The high rate of tympanostomy tube placement in preschool children does not result in reduced antimicrobial consumption.

In children younger than 2 years, concurrent adenoidectomy during the insertion of tympanostomy tubes does not seem to have a major advantage over the insertion of tympanostomy tubes alone in preventing otitis media.

The team enlisted 6350 healthy babies from birth to 2 months old and have regularly measured fluid in these children’s ear up until their third birthdays. If children developed significant fluid in the ears that lasted for at least 3 months straight or 4 out of six months, half of the children received ear tube surgery. The other half waited for 6 to 9 months longer and then had surgery only if the fluid remained. What was the outcome? When the children were 4 years old, they received an extensive battery of intelligence, development, speech, language, and behavioral tests, looking at verbal and nonverbal growth. No difference could be found between the early and late treatment groups. Researchers will continue to follow these children as they grow up. But for now, this large, carefully designed study has found no developmental benefit from rushing to ear tubes for young children.

Children are frequently prescribed ear tube surgery with the rationale that the surgery preserves normal learning and behavior through primary school A recent study, however challenges this practice with evidence contrary to routine pediatirc practice.